It appears that Sony is placing a renewed focus on cloud gaming, as evidenced by their recent hiring spree for cloud gaming tech roles, including a position dedicated to developing and delivering the strategic vision for cloud game streaming at PlayStation. Additionally, Sony is aggressively pushing to patent cloud gaming technology, with Mark Cerny himself having his name on numerous 2022 and 2023 patent applications related to the field. Many of these patents explore using the power of multiple GPUs to power a single person’s game or view through a VR headset, as well as ways to share a single GPU across multiple applications.
While there is no indication that Sony will be launching its own next-gen cloud gaming service in the immediate future, it is clear that the company is taking steps to prepare for such a move. It is also worth noting that Sony has been trying to patent ways to deal with the unwieldy economics of cloud gaming, such as pausing and resuming games in the cloud, handing them off to different devices, and streaming them to a web browser.
As for the potential for a new handheld gaming system from Sony, it seems unlikely that such a device would be limited to only streaming games from your own PS5 via Remote Play. Instead, it is more likely that any new handheld from Sony would be designed to work seamlessly with their next-gen cloud gaming service when it is eventually launched. Of course, this is all speculation at this point, and we will have to wait and see what Sony has in store for the future of cloud gaming.